Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Saturday February 23, 2008 @10:51AM
from the evangelism-is-time-consuming dept.

sigzero writes "Short but sweet: RMS is stepping down as Emacs Maintainer: 'From: Richard Stallman, Subject: Re: Looking for a new Emacs maintainer or team, Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:57:22 -0500 Stefan and Yidong offered to take over, so I am willing to hand over Emacs development to them."

I'm not sure why this was ever supposed to be funny. Emacs has always been unapologetically a meta-editor. It's got lots of great editors. I've found c-mode (more of a supermode, actually) and python-mode (with a couple extensions) to be great. And SLIME [common-lisp.net] is so good it's practically mandatory for anybody writing Common Lisp. I haven't seen anything equal to SLIME, on any platform or for any language. It makes Intellisense look like Notepad -- it's just insanely productive.

On the negative side, the support for character devices (like sound cards) and other hardware is mostly missing. Although the POSIX interface is provided, some additional interfaces like POSIX shared memory or semaphores are still under development

GNU Emacs was written. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1984. Human decisions are removed from text editing functions. Emacs begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th, 2006. In a panic, RMS tries to pull the plug....

EMACS the only software you need.I remember being told this before rushing home to d/l and install it.It gave me a hunger for linux too and though I never mastered its complexities for most things I do,It is amazing and I hope it stays maintained.RMS is amazing,I wish him well in any venture he chooses.

For certain values of "need".
For example, to make picture-mode work for photographs, you'd need a canvas about the size of an aircraft carrier flight deck to express the pixels as text, more RAM than Dodge's truck division to hold the image, and a great deal of patience to scroll it on a typical LCD.
Really, it's OK to pick the proper tool for the job.

For example, to make picture-mode work for photographs, you'd need a canvas about the size of an aircraft carrier flight deck to express the pixels as text, more RAM than Dodge's truck division to hold the image, and a great deal of patience to scroll it on a typical LCD.

Or go with the XEmacs fork, which supports real bitmaps (and has been maintained without RMS for years).

Indeed he can. In 2003 I attended a free software press conference in Soissons, France at which he spoke at length in French about free software, GNU, and a few other topics. While socially awkward, he is quite capable in front of groups and spoke well and without the need for assistance.

Unfortunately for me, in 2003 I knew exactly zero French so I mostly stared blankly for an hour and a half. Oh well...:)

RMS is relatively a saint.
Those that want to look past Castro's brutality and focus on "stickin' it to the man" are in very poor taste.
That kind of sloppy thinking abets the Castros of the world in their efforts to suppress political freedom and practice brutality.
The media are a bunch of sycophants for doing this, and it's a shame that the more technically sharp on/. would play along.

I love emacs and RMS' work over the years.. but... The last great emacs release was 19.34b. Every release since then has suffered badly from bloat and other crud. Unfortunately 19.34b doesn't compile on any modern platform (though in 1998 it could be compiled in under 10 seconds on an Origin 2000 with 8 CPUs).

Here is a transcript:Me: Every release since 19.34b has suffered badly from bloat and other crud.Emacs: What would happen if 19 34b has suffered badly from bloat and other crud?Me: MULE was probably the worst offender.Emacs: Why do you say mule was probably the worst offender?Me: Such a fat jackass, that MULE.Emacs: Can you elaborate on that?

I like mg, which is a tiny, fast clone of emacs. I only revert to using emacs on the rare occasions when I need to do something fancy that mg can't do. On my (pretty fast) system, emacs -nw takes 2 seconds to start up, which is annoying and totally unnecessary when all I want to do is some simple text editing. I also found that with emacs, I was spending a lot of time websurfing for information on how to turn off features that I didn't want (syntax coloring, automatic indentation,...). "Open the pod bay do

Actually, I see the problem as the exact opposite. It used to be that people would ask themselves "I got this huge powerful 20 MHz computer with 4 megabytes of RAM, how will I ever I ever use all that power", and the nerd overhearing it would answer "use Emacs", and despite advances in computers, Emacs could keep track and was always the program that could fully utilize your hardware.

However, somewhere along the way we lost out to the competition. I see kids in the Emacs fora who, with a straight face, say they prefer Emacs because it is such as lean and mean editing machine. It is so sad. People nowadays go to Microsoft, KDE or Gnome for software to fully utilize their machines. In the olden days, Emacs would have offered a superset of all of these environments!

I think it is good RMS is stepping back. We need young people to revitalize Emacs, and once again make it a leader in resource consumption. We need to get back to our roots. We need EGACS: Eight Gigabytes And Constantly Swapping.

It's been downhill since the late 17s, in fact. The moment the whole debacle with Epoch, Lucid etc sprung up, emacs became an exercise in people with great programming skills but minimal taste. Windowing support was the last straw: none of them are any good, and they clutter the editor up. Disclaimer: I am not innocent. I wrote the original code that went into the late 17s to provide support for emacs in Suntools. Partly because X11 standardisation was late arriving, emacs got cluttered with Suntools, NeWS, Apollo, X10 and X11 windowing, none of it good enough to be better than leaving the hell alone.
And anyway, although I love GNU emacs to death and I've been using emacsen of various forms for twenty-five years (well, since December 1983), whisper it who dares that actually Greenberg's Multics Emacs had the benefit of being written in genuine MacLisp, including the redisplay loop, whereas GNU Emacs is actually mostly written in C. A trip into the Multics emacs source code is well worthwhile: some of the problems it's solving (redisplay onto vt100 displays down 300 baud circuits) aren't interesting per se, but the approaches most certainly are.

You could switch them off by putting "(menu-bar-mode -1)" and "(tool-bar-mode -1)" in your.emacs file. Alternatively, you could put "Emacs.menuBar: off" etc. in your.Xresources or similar file if you're using X. All this stuff is in the Emacs documentation.

Yes, it's true that RMS will no longer the main Emacs maintainer, but the truth is he will still be very close to the project. RMS is merely shifting to a subset; he has dedicated himself to filling a gap that has been missing in the Emacs operating system for a long time; the lack of a robust, powerful, yet easy-to-use editor.

Jokes aside, after trying many free and commercial LaTeX editors, I ended up running Auctex under Emacs. Beats anything else. That's my main usage of Emacs (and I use LaTeX a lot, to typeset math staff).

Disagree. He championed the important idea that sharing source code is a Good Thing, and did it with a degree of consistency over time that is remarkable.
Yeah, I lose track of his ideas after a point (ethics), but I'm a firm believer in "credit where due".
Certainly more deserving of something like a Nobel Peace Prize than some of the nitwits that have besmirched the concept in recent history.
Anyone know how to nominate someone for http://www.medaloffreedom.com/ [medaloffreedom.com]

I've had some extended discussions with him over email.
Hence the fact that I taper off from agreement when the discussion gets abstract: his philosophical basis leaves me unmoved.
However, when you consider the impact of the GPL, GCC, and the FSF world-wide, and into the future, the Nobel Peace Prize makes sense, even if the fellow himself has some cantankerous moments.
In any case, I submit that the man's overall historical impact may rank with Gutenberg, and for the same reason: taking information out of the hands of the elite and offering a level playing field. Gutenberg did it for literacy, Stallman for programming.

By the early '90s, people were routinely giving source code to their customers, rather than trusting "code escrow" services.

I wasn't only giving source - I was also giving a (legit original paid-for) CD with the compiler and tools.

I figured it was just good marketing - giving them the source was an additional incentive to deal with me instead of a competitor, and when it came time for mods, after they screwed it up, I'd get the business of making it right:-)

At that point I had not yet heard of RMS or the term "open source" - it just made good sense to help differentiate oneself in a competitive market.

"We have 3 bids, all about the same price, but one of them is also giving us the source code." - gee, which one would YOU deal with?

By the early '90s, people were routinely giving source code to their customers, rather than trusting "code escrow" services.

By the early '60s, people were routinely giving source code to their customers.

Mr. Stallman explains in his historical writings and speeches how he first saw free software ethics in action in the early behavior of both academic and commercial software developers. When vendors moved, in a very large way, away from free source, he recognized the danger, and opposed the trend with his proselytizing for free software. The whole context in which you worked in the early 90's was shaped by that.

You don't mention what sort of software you provide to your customers. Unless it includes an operating system kernel, then they depend either on binary-only code from MS or Apple, or on free code that depends one way or another on Mr. Stallman's free software movement (yes, even if it's not licensed under GPL).

I started studying computing in 1969, and devoted my career to it. I contributed to the world as much as I could figure out and accomplish. Mr. Stallman's contributions are so many orders of magnitude greater than mine, I am filled with awe. All of my software development, research, or teaching today depends on things that he supported in various ways. I have no interest in carping about his personal affect, nor the things that he didn't do in addition to all that he did, nor the things that could conceivably have been done better if someone else who didn't do them had done them. Nor in the supposition that those ignorant of his work were therefore not aided by it.

In any case, I submit that the man's overall historical impact may rank with Gutenberg, and for the same reason: taking information out of the hands of the elite and offering a level playing field. Gutenberg did it for literacy, Stallman for programming.

This sentence, as far as Gutenberg is concerned, makes no sense whatsoever. Medieval nobles were illiterate, they didn't consider it worth their time to learn how to read. The thing is, if you were able to read, you would go after a literacy-requiring work,

I'm drawing a parallel between the effect of movable type upon literacy, which was subsequently no longer a skill confined to a few based upon scarcity of printed works, and the advocacy of source code availability resulting from the GPL, and making the prediction that the GPL will have similar long-term effects.
You can certainly attack the comparison on technical grounds.
It's like a car, see...

I'm not too sure I agree with you here. Prior to the printing press, as you point out, literacy was a skill set very few people possessed, and the scarcity of texts certainly helped to perpetuate this state of affairs. With the advent of the printing press, texts became far more common place, and hence there was more incentive and opportunity to learn to read.

In a similar fashion, programming is a skill set possessed by relatively few people, but I don't think scarcity of available code or a lack of oppor

You can learn to write programs from books that teach the material, but to learn to write good programs requires seeing other good programs. It takes a very long time to go from your built-in BASIC interpreter and a manual to writing actually useful, well-designed programs, but having access to the source for other programs can accelerate that process.

Microsoft's compiler is very good, and if you're learning to write Hello, World! then there's no real difference between using it and using gcc. But if you

Not to really detract from your point (with which I agree), but I would just say that our modern knowledge of medieval literacy is a bit different than older theories. Not bringing up other evidence, the mere fact that within 30 years of Gutenberg's invention of the press that every city of any size in Europe from Andalusia to Hungary had a printing press (literally within 30 years--the rate of advance was staggering!) gives some clues about how many people really were literate--after all, you don't need pr

You can use printing presses to stamp out libels with cartoons on them. Even people who can't read can get the value of your cartoon if it's good enough. The political cartoon is an extremely powerful form of expression for just that reason.

Ho ho ho, in effect, books were in the hands of the elite, the monasteries also being part of the elite in that time, but also some noblemen had their own libraries . The value of the books was immense, as only up to a hundred copies were available and these books would not be given in the hands of some lower-class person (if that person could read at all). In practice, if you wanted to get a copy of a book, you would have to be able to afford a servant who could read and write, and send this servant all th

"The elite" refers to the church, not the nobles. If the Pope didn't like what you were doing, the threat of excommunication brought even kings back in line.

This is an oversimplification of what happened then.

If the Church (not only the Pope, but a lot of people; just the Pope disagreeing meant nothing if the others agreed) saw a problem in what you wrote, they would send someone knowledgeable on the subject to talk to you ("inquisitor" means "asker"), requesting you both to talk on the subject. This talk could proceed for as long as it was needed for one to convince the other, or for both to agree that an agreements was unreachable. Depending on what of these things happened, this was the procedure:

a) In case you were convinced by the inquisitor, nothing happened, of course. You both went back to your lives.

b) In case the inquisitor was convinced by you, what historically happened many times, he would take the subject back to the Vatican where it would enter the list of themes to be debated in the next council. Afterwards, once the council happened, one of two things could happen after some months of debate: the Church as a whole might conclude you were in fact correct, and change accordingly (what also happened historically many times), or it could conclude you and the inquisitor were wrong. What, however, didn't exclude the possibility of the theme being the subject of other councils, and the Church position change again, what also happened many times.

As for you yourself, the practical consequences while your position wasn't agreed upon by the Church were similar to the next case:

c) In case you both agreed that you couldn't reach an agreement on the subject, a document was presented to you wish you was expected to sign. This document basically said that you were aware that your arguments weren't strong enough to convince other sages as much knowledgeable on the subject as you; thus, that the Church's position on the matter could very well be the correct, that you're just unable to fully appreciate it; and thus, that since it's not a certainty, it isn't worth disclosing to less knowledgeable people as a proven fact, so to avoid social distress. You signed it, and while nothing happened to you, you could still bring the subject to discussion and investigation on Universities.

d) The last alternative was you refusing to sign the document, and then walking around preaching your ideas as if they were pure facts, trying to convince the simple people as a compensation for the fact you didn't manage to convince those at your own knowledge level, i.e., by becoming a cult leader and, as more and more non-scholars were convinced by you, a source of social unrest. This would set you as an heretical and put an excommunication decree over your head, with the consequences we know.

So, it's extremely naive, historically, to think the Church went directly to 'd'. It rarely happened, and most of the time the Church was a very reasonable entity for the time (for example, by threatening with excommunication those civil official who used more than one torture session on a suspect, as the custom was a lot of torture sessions; and by dismissing as unfounded and freeing the accused in 99 of each 100 witchcraft trials). They assumed that the unrestricted diffusion as fact of unproven and unsustainable hypotheses and theories would result in utter chaos, and history has shown they were correct in this regards as far as the immediately following centuries is concerned, as the many religious wars of the subsequent Modern Age have shown.

In fact, it took a lot of blood for societies to develop the profound concept of "Just don't care what your neighbor think, damn it!". Now we know this is possible, but at the time no one dreamed of such a possibility, and contrasting their stance of "perfect the proof, reach unanimity on it, and only then diffuse it" with the current understanding that "complete freedom of

My (wildly paraphrased) understanding is that his philosophical basis treats software like chess pieces: everything stays on the table, in plain view.
Less cheekily, I'd say he's after building a community that has a homogeneous view. Kinda like the Amish, with source code instead of plows.
The point about tapering off that I'm making is this: it's one thing to state your views in a positive way, and quite another to anathematize others who disagree.
Stallman's desire for community is simply one among many

He's got a very clear course plotted for his ideas.
He offers precise feedback on where he disagrees with others.
He does get shrill and baffling when he ventures into the abstract, and calls others "unethical".
For me to follow his train of thought there, he would have to publish a complete philosophical model.
But so what? His flamewars have contributed far less carbon to the atmosphere than those of other Nobel laureates.

You Sir (or Madam), are an ignoramus (first class), and the irrelevance is all yours: Emacs, as Neal Stephenson once said; "outshines all other editors as the noonday sun does the stars" - and it still does. Of course if you don't know why it does so, you'd probably be better off using a tool designed for less smart people anyway:) More importantly, it is quite possible - likely even - that there would be no such thing as FOSS if it were not for RMS, and the world would be a much worse place for intelligen

Can anyone explain the fascination with there needing to be one that is better? Different strokes for different folks. I don't get how this stupid 'vi VS emacs' is still continuing. I guess the world must be doing alright if this is what people find to argue about:)

Probably a holdover from the days of 300 MB hard drives, when you didn't really have the luxury of installing multiple text editors. Or just a nerdy version of that stupid Ford vs. Chevy game that the teenage redneck boys like to play.

You Sir (or Madam), are an ignoramus (first class), and the irrelevance is all yours: Emacs, as Neal Stephenson once said; "outshines all other editors as the noonday sun does the stars" - and it still does. Of course if you don't know why it does so, you'd probably be better off using a tool designed for less smart people anyway:) More importantly, it is quite possible - likely even - that there would be no such thing as FOSS if it were not for RMS, and the world would be a much worse place for intelligen

No offense to RMS, he's really done so much more than words could express, but as an emacs maintainer, he's been nothing but a roadblock for... well, longer than the lives of half of Slashdot's population. I applaud him for seeing that he's been hindering emacs development instead of helping it and stepping down without succumbing to the arrogance and feeling of "ownership" of a project that some others exhibit.

The reason RMS is stepping down is Emacs doesn't need any more developement - its self-aware,

You are of course trolling to hell and back, but I would like to make one point..

I saw RMS about 10 years ago, and found him to be a real 'hippie'. It was really quite embarrassing.

But I saw him again just 2 years ago and found that he'd changed a lot. He gave a very good speech and talked about the copyright on books. He proposed a two year copyright length on books, extended if it sells well to five years etc. He put forward his reasoning (Most books go out of print after two years), and the reaction from book writers during his research (positive), etc. It was a very reasonable argument. He brought up the philisophy of being free, but it was more of an undertone, than a dominant statement.

I think RMS has matured a lot during the years. Maybe listen to one of his recent talks and give him a fair ear. If you still don't like him, then fair enough.